At a Glimpse
by Foibles and Fables
Summary: A set of ficlets written for a Mark and/or Lexie Drabble-a-Thon on LiveJournal. Alex/Lexie, George/Lexie, and two Mark/Lexie pieces, concerning mistakes, things coming full circle, a onesie, and the color red.


**To break my inactivity, I have here a few drabbles I wrote for a Mark and/or Lexie Drabble-A-Thon on LiveJournal. The prompt is in bold above the ficlet. Hope you enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Grey's Anatomy is the property of Shonda Rhimes and ABC. This writing is for entertainment purposes only and is not for profit.  
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**Mistakes, Alex/Lexie**

He hadn't been expecting it. Not after what he had told her earlier that day, about what kind of guy he was and what she could expect of him. No, nothing prepared him for the moment a few hours later when she walked up to him, hands on her hips and a glimmer in her eyes.

"If you don't want to have a drink with me," she offered, raising her eyebrows, "then how about some sex instead?" He laughed, thinking she was joking. But she pursed her lips, dead serious, and waited for his response, and all at once she wasn't the girl he took her for.

What was he supposed to say? _No?_

So Alex took her home (because it's his home too). He tore her clothes off halfway up the stairs, inciting mad giggles and blushing. He ripped the sheet off of his bed and wrapped her in it, trapping her in his arms and pressing her against the wall before moving in for a kiss. Lexie smiled and closed the rest of the distance, eagerly waiting for their lips to crash together for the first time.

When suddenly there was a twist of fate that Lexie never could have seen coming and never wanted to see coming. There stood Meredith, dumbfounded and disgusted at the same time. She stared at them for a few seconds and they stared back. Caught red-handed. The clinch of the century.

Meredith closed her bedroom door without a word and Lexie's insides turned to goo. She whipped her head to look back at Alex, terrified and humiliated. He merely regarded her with a slightly amused grin.

"Please," she said in a smaller voice than he ever thought possible, "tell me you don't live with Meredith Grey." He shrugged. It wasn't vital information.

Lexie hid her face in her hands, wishing she could vanish and then reappear at Mass Gen. "Oh, God," she said more than once. "This was a mistake. I'm so sorry, this was a mistake, I never should have come here with you-"

He cut her off by leaning into her, their hips squared, eyes half-lidded and mouth curled into a smirk in an expression that made her breath hitch.

He spoke, and it was gravelly and cocky with the slightest hint of underlying meaning. "Alex Karev doesn't make mistakes."

Then he kissed her, a good one, and she shuddered in his arms; she thought he might have meant it in at least one way.

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**Full Circle, George/Lexie**

It's too late for it now, way too late, but George is missing it. He's missing the late nights spent studying for his intern exam retake (which, in retrospect, didn't really end up making his life any better). He's missing how she would walk around the crapartment in the morning, wearing a half-asleep smile, tootbrush hanging limply from the corner of her mouth. He remembers how they used to talk for hours, dodging cockroaches, and that one time they made a slightly intoxicated late-night run to Wal-Mart to buy a space heater.

He just plain misses _her_.

That night when she looked him straight in the eye, one hand on the doorknob and the other on the side of her neck (she held herself there sometimes when she was stressed) and uttered, "Rent the room." he knew. There was no doubt about it, it was written all over her face. He read her like a book. _There's someone else, and it's Mark Sloan. Sorry, but not sorry._

And then, all too late (he's beginning to sense a pattern here), it hit him. What could have been and what should have been.

He realized that they could have worked. He realized that they could have been good together. She wasn't Izzie or Meredith or Callie. She was somebody else entirely who he could have liked a lot. And now she's with Mark Sloan. She's ungodly _happy_ with Mark Sloan.

And to think, at one time, she could have been just as happy with him.

Now that he missed his chance, things have come full circle in a big way.

He's sitting at Joe's, by himself, nursing a beer with his gaze glued to the bar. Drinking alone always made him upset but it's all he does these days. At the other end of the bar he sees her, standing in front of Sloan's barstool, hands on his knees and eyes half-shut in playful flirtation. He leans forward and, smirking, whispers something in her ear. Lexie draws away and laughs, her giggles somehow making their way over the other standard bar noises and hitting George's ears. He's familiar with the sound; it once filled George's apartment more times than he could count. It's far from the first time he's heard it.

But it's the first time Lexie's laughter ever hurt him.

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**Onesie, Mark/Lexie**

Mark comes home one evening clutching a tiny gift bag and wearing an ear-to-ear grin; it's the one kind that, through all the years, has never failed to take Lexie's breath away. He barely gets through the doorway before he kisses her and says in this amazingly happy voice, "Wait until you see what I picked up."

Apparently she's too slow and he's too eager because he can't even wait for her to take the bag from him and open it and he's reaching into it himself, still beaming. After a pause for dramatic effect, he produces a onesie from amongst the tissue paper in the bag. It's blue, red, and white - The Giants (because he already went down the Yankees route years ago and learned his lesson more than well enough from that). Waggling his eyebrows, he waves the itty-bitty garment in front of Lexie's face.

"Well?" he says, and underneath the smile and shining blue eyes he's seeking approval on so many levels, not just for his purchase. And as Lexie regards his excitement with a pained grin, it breaks her heart that she has to rain on his parade.

"That's really sweet, Mark," she tells him and he brightens like a child who just earned a gold star. She winces. "But I really can't take that."

The elation flees Mark like a balloon that just had the air let out of it and his face goes totally pale. He gives Lexie an expression of half-terror, half-hurt, and he just knows that the past is about to repeat itself. Why wouldn't it, he wonders silently in that moment of fear.

Until Lexie kisses him softly, wordlessly reassuring him, taking his hand and placing it on her belly, on the small swell that has just started developing there. It makes him feel a little better and she still wants him and their child but the confusion remains.

"I meant," she continues, "I can't accept that. You think I would let our baby wear a Giants onsesie? No way, buddy." She pinches Mark's cheek and he has to laugh, a sound filled with relief on a breath that he's finally able to let go.

"Jets?" he offers, then, playing along. Lexie scoffs and shakes her head and he falls in love with her all over again.

"Seriously? I'm a Seahawks girl, born and raised," she declares proudly, narrowing her dark eyes at him playfully. "Even at Harvard, with all of those asshole Pats fans around. So if you're going to get a sports onesie for our baby, make it a Hawks one." She sticks her nose in the air with fake defiance.

Mark counters with his own fake emotion: disgust. "The damn Seahawks?" he whines.

"Yes, the damn Seahawks."

Mark sighs exaggeratedly. "Fine, Seahawks it is," he says begrudgingly. "But you have to promise me one thing." He's no longer speaking to Lexie, but to the new life inside of her, between then, and the pride seeping from every aspect of him renders Lexie speechless. "You have to promise me that you'll watch the Giants with your old dad," he tells his son or daughter. He strokes Lexie's belly through her shirt and Lexie smiles warmly.

"I don't think that will be a problem."

They both know that the onesie itself isn't the issue. It's the fact that a onesie is needed at all. It's that there's a future, a second chance, something more than wonderful about to happen.

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**Red, Mark/Lexie**

Mark Sloan's life dealt in shades of red.

First and foremost, he was a doctor, a surgeon. Red was the color of blood, a stark contrast against white gloves or blue scrubs - arterial blood, the thick stuff, was the boldest hue he had ever seen. Red was courage to perform a new procedure, it was strength in the face of mishap, it was pure exhilaration when he pulled off an incredible surgery. Bright scarlet flashes filled his days at the hospital and defined that part of him.

Then there were the one-night stands, the many women who used to fill his evenings to the brim. They had red-painted nails, good for seduction. They wore red dresses when they were begging to be noticed; revealing, short, tight, low-cut, and the color of the material stood out sharply against his sheets when he would take them home. Red marks were left on his neck, red lipstick stains all over his body, red scratches down his back when things got rough. It was also the color of the sunrises he would see when he snuck out early in the morning to avoid awkward conversation and confrontation.

For a long time he bgan to associate the color red with Addison - how could he not, when her most prominent physical feature was her luxurious auburn hair? The secret nights filled with dangerous passion glowed a red so strong it was almost orange. On the other hand, the pain of betraying Derek came in as a dull ruddy color. Red was the color of the excitement he created when he found out he was going to be a father, and it was the color of the heart she didn't know he had but managed to break more than once. Red were bloodshot eyes, on both of them, when tears merely threatened because it all got to be too much. Red was her leaving New York, leaving him.

Red kept a negative connotation for a long time. Until Lexie. Everything about her screamed red. Her pinkish lips, pouting or smiling or parted, kissing his. The thrill and frustration of desiring forbidden fruit. The lust that kept him awake at night seeped scarlet. The night she first came to him, red was his surprise at her appearance, the color of her bra, red were the flashes of light that burned behind his eyes at orgasm.

Red was his bravery in coming clean to Derek. Her porcelain cheeks were flooded with a shade close to an apple when he looked hungrily at her or whispered something particularly suggestive in her ear.

Red was the heart that beat in her chest, the one that he could feel against him at night, something he thought he'd never go for but seemed to regardless. The sunsets they sometimes watched together from the balcony of his hotel room were red mixed with beautiful oranges and purples.

The feelings she was bringing out from within him were a new and strange shade of it, light but deep, confusing and frustrating but lovely. It was a color Crayola didn't think of, a heart-hammering sensation he didn't know the name of but was willing to learn from her and with her. It was incredible. Lexie was incredible.

Red was incredible.

Mark Sloan's life dealt in shades of red. For the _best_ part of his life, this was no exception.


End file.
